Maori Party must be naive to negotiate for a committee on poverty

Set up a committee on poverty and say that is a way to stop it? Daft as. Hone is right. Koretake! Useless!

The way to stop poverty is to legislate and tax so that it stops the profiting from the passive ownership of land, resources or money. This is the New Economics Party policy and gets to the root of poverty issues. Tax what you use not what you earn, tax what you take not what you make.

Today I found that after the Global Financial Crisis in UK, there was a conference on Economic Justice and a Council of Economic Justice was set up. To the conference were invited many organisations which advocated monetary reform and many who advocated Land Taxation Tax and other resource taxes. This Council will have a great deal in common with our party. Meanwhile the Libdems have a group called ALTER which advocates land value taxes and the Scottish Greens now has a policy on this at local level. We are in touch with Earthsharing Canada and it is very gratifying to know that Frank De Jong is starting to read on the topic of monetary reform.

So oh dear Pita and Tariana. You are more naive than I thought. All you will do is watch the gap between rich and poor widen and widen, but you will at least know that statistics. To have a committee chaired by the very person who introduced a rise in the regressive GST tax regime shows how utterly ineffective it is going to be.

Monetary reform and land value taxes have been around for centuries, but in my lifetime they have never been implemented except for a brief period when we had unimproved value as a basis for  most of our local body rates.

As Europe counts down to Friday, global temperatures set to rise further and further

Today we heard the greenhouse gas emissions had risen by 5.9% in 2010. The world is on track for an 11 degree F rise in temperature and this came from the normally conservative Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency. He had quite recently stated “We need to leave oil before it leaves us.” Something will have to happen quickly or else it will become completely irreversible.

Meanwhile our Treasury has of course stated that it has to revise the preelection forecast for economic growth, which, as I pointed out before, was predicated on three inaccurate assumptions. As I was gardening today I wondered how they managed to get it SO WRONG. Anyone with a brain who was following the developments in the Eurogeddon crisis could see there would be no smooth resolution of the debt crisis there. You can’t solve debt with more debt, it just puts off the day of reckoning.  And they assumed the price of West Texas oil would not go beyond $93 a barrel by 2016. Well I looked at the trend of that and it has already been beyond $93 but has dropped back. It is the lowest of the three types of oil quoted in our paper every day. On 2 Dec it was $100 a barrel and Dubai, which is the oil we rely on, was $106. As for growth of our trading partners, forget it. I don’t know why we pay these Treasury officials so highly if they are so stupid.

This week five people from Transition Town Lower Hutt put out a warning on the Euro crisis and suggested planning for a crisis by having a store of food, money and water. Sensible people all of them. Robin Westenra does a wonderful blog.

But good news. Today we heard from two people in Nelson who want to start our first branch there so we put them in touch with each other! And some really good people have now joined including a well respected environmental economist.

I received a letter back from the Minister of Defence last Friday saying no they had not received any information on the security implications if ur oil supply is disrupted.  He referred me to the Defence White Paper 2010  on www.defence.govt.nz. I haven’t had time to read it all, but once again I despair if our Minister of Defence and his officials don’t read the military reports put out in Germany and in US on the implications of oil supply for defence. Maybe there is a frustrated official somewhere in the Ministry of Defence. A job for someone?

So we await the Merkosy solution to the Europe debt issue